The invention relates generally to alarm systems that indicate smoke, fire, carbon monoxide, and/or other conditions, and more particularly, to an alarm systems used for hearing impaired individuals.
During a fire or another hazardous condition, the occupants of a building may only have a few minutes to escape without harm. Due to the potentially limited escape time, it is imperative to provide ample warning to the occupants of a building when a hazardous condition is detected. Most detector and alarm devices rely on audible alarms to alert the occupants in a residential or commercial building. Hearing-impaired persons may experience difficulty in recognizing the warning of a hazardous condition from a conventional alarm. For example, they might not hear an alarm or notice other people responding to an alarm and thus fail to become aware of an emergency situation.
In response to this problem, building and fire regulations mandate that public structures include bright, flashing lights, such as strobes for example, to alert individuals with such impairments. The xenon strobe lights used in conventional alarm systems require a high voltage to produce a flash bright enough to meet building regulations, particularly the minimum intensity requirement viewed from the side of an alarm device. In addition, the xenon lamp generates a significant amount of heat during each flash as a result of the high voltage. Therefore, providing such alarm devices throughout all of the required spaces within a building may be difficult and costly. In addition, the reliability of such devices depends on the availability and integrity of the xenon lamps used, both of which, in recent years, have declined.